Reader 54 Summer Issue is now on sale (£6.95), featuring novelist Salley Vickers (The Cleaner of Chartres); Guardian writer Erwin James; novelist, biographer and critic Margaret Drabble (the 2000 Oxford Companion to English Literature and The Radiant Way, 2014), together with philanthropist and retired IT businesswoman Dame Stephanie Shirley, who writes about her flight as a young girl from Nazi Germany.

You will find poets Julie-ann Rowell, John Write, Andrew Forster, Niall Firth and Jennie Owen. Sean Elliott provides the latest in our long-running series ‘Poet on His (or Her) Work’, with a discussion of his poem ‘Margate’ (there is a ghost in this story).Writer and scholar Drummond Bone provides the fiction. There are all of our regular writers, including another great piece from Ian McMillan (BBC Radio 3’s The Verb) and our usual recommendations, quizzes and familiar voices.

The Interview in issue 54 is with the campaigning barrister Shauneen Lambe who talks about her work with prisoners on death row in Louisiana, and her present involvement with the UK charity Just for Kids Law.

SUBSCRIBE

It has been the guiding principle of the Reader magazine that new and established writers should find a home side by side on our pages with no distinction drawn between them. The quality of the writing is what matters. And in the same spirit we want our readers to feel close to the quick of the matter. We called our magazine ‘The Reader’ because of the vital relationship a reader has to literature, bringing life to the writers’ words. In that sense, unknowingly, a blog-like spirit of sharing has always been at the heart of what we have been doing these last eighteen or so years in making the ink and paper version of the magazine.

The blog is the perfect opportunity to take the idea further. We hope that readers old and new will visit often to talk about the reading matters that move, vex or rouse them.

You will find a range of additional articles and features to enliven the print version of the magazine with further discussion and audio, though it is intended that the content will also stand alone for readers who prefer their reading in pixels:

The Main Event. In the light of the prison book ban, we focus on Erwin James’s essay, posted here in full. Erwin writes about the profound effect a book on Alfred Dreyfus had on his state of mind while serving a life sentence for murder.

Beat the Ban! We asked our contributors to No.54 to recommend a book to send to an imaginary friend in prison. Click here.

Audio.Julie-ann Rowell reads her two fine poems ‘Photograph by Shomei Tomatsu’ and ‘The Demolition of Mary Help of Christians Roman Catholic Church’. It’s our intention to slowly build up an archive of poetry readings — destined to be one of our favourite features of the blog.

Out Now! In Reader 54…

Issue 54 of the magazine is now on sale, featuring new poetry by Julie-ann Rowell, featured here, John White, Andrew Forster, Jennie Owen and Niall Firth. Sean Elliott provides the latest in the sequence of our series Poet on His Work looking at his poem ‘Margate’ and providing a remarkably even-toned account of living in a haunted house.

New fiction comes from Drummond Bone in the shape of two stories from a longer sequence, which focuses ‘on the problems of pleasure in our new century’. Erwin James writes about how a book gave shape to a profound dream while he was in prison. Philanthropist and retired IT business woman, Dame Stephanie Shirley writes about being a refugee from Nazi Germany, while Margaret Drabble gives a personal response to Arnold Bennett, and Shauneen Lambe in a wide-ranging interview talks about working with prisoners on death row in Louisiana. Salley Vickers reveals how she just may owe her life to a poem.

‘The Reader is one of the best things to thump through the letter box… full of pithy, passionate and precise things’

In prison you exist on dreams, nightmares and fantasies. When you are locked and isolated in a cell for twenty three hours out of twenty four you try to block the nightmares, enjoy the dreams and occasionally indulge in fantasies. I found this out after I was sentenced to life imprisonment and taken from the Old Bailey to Wandsworth prison in south London. With few apparent skills or abilities and almost insurmountable failings to overcome my prospects were bleak. It was impossible for me to try to rationalise my situation – or to reflect on the idea of change or personal development. The four walls contained me. I was so defeated that I lacked even the desire to be anything other than what I had become – little more than an inarticulate, ill-educated brute. The early weeks and months of my imprisonment provided no clues that a life spent in prison could ever remedy my deep-rooted inadequacies.

But at least I could read.

I had no strategy for how I was going to adapt to living my life inside. The routine in Wandsworth was mind-numbingly repetitious. The cell doors were opened for just a few minutes at a time each day: for slop-out (emptying the toilet bucket in a communal sluice) and to collect washing water and breakfast; for exercise – we were supposed to get half an hour outside each day to walk in a marked out circle in the yard, so long as the weather was not ‘inclement’ (a word I had never heard before I went to prison); to collect lunch; to collect the evening meal at around 4.30, and then briefly later in the evening when tea, nicknamed ‘diesel’ because of its foul consistency, was brought to the cell doors by an orderly and poured from a bucket into our plastic pint mugs. The times out of cell, though brief were long enough for incidents of violence to take place. A ‘nonce’ (sex offender) or a ‘grass’ (informer) being ambushed in the toilet recess area was a regular occurrence. Prison officers took their time to respond and rarely before serious damage had been inflicted on the victim. The loneliness was intense, yet I was glad of the solitude of my cell.

We were allowed one shower a week and one change of socks, underwear and shirt. Every Saturday morning we were taken six at a time to the prison library where we could choose six books. This was the most exciting hour of the week. Even though the choice was limited my desperation for reading material was great. I needed escape and so mostly I read Western paperbacks. Edge: The Loner was my favourite. When I grew tired of Westerns I tried novels by Stephen King, history books, ghost stories. All these books fed my imagination, but none made me think like the book I was sent by a friend: Prisoners of Honour by David L Lewis.

The book was about a Frenchman called Alfred Dreyus. Dreyfus was a Captain in the French army, a Jew, who had been subjected to the most incredible injustice imaginable. Wrongly accused and convicted of spying for Germany, Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1894 and shipped out to spend the rest of his life on a tiny island ten miles off the coast of Guyane Française. Devil’s Island was the smallest of the three Salvation Islands, so called because early French settlers, suffering from tropical diseases and malnutrition, found refuge there and managed to survive.

ISLE DU DIABLE, photograph by Martin Argles of the Guardian

But there was no salvation for Dreyfus – only a specially built prison measuring just a few metres square. Through the bars of the single window he often looked out over the Atlantic Ocean. I imagined him holding those bars, squeezing them tighter and tighter in agonising frustration at the wrong that had been done to him. Dreyfus was a loyal soldier and servant to France. He was a man of the highest integrity with a methodological attitude to his work and his ambition. ‘Until now,’ he wrote in his prison diary, ‘I made a cult of reason. I used to believe in the logic of things and events. Finally I used to believe in human justice!’ He was a fine soldier, one of the finest in the French officer class – and he was also a loving and devoted husband and father to his two young children. The strain of his predicament is palpable in his letters to Lucie, his wife. ‘When I promised you to go on living, when I promised to bear up until my name has been vindicated, I made the greatest sacrifice possible for a man of feeling and integrity.’

This good man’s only ‘crime’ was to have been a Jew. For this his colleagues were prepared to join against him in a conspiracy of falsehoods and deceit, even though the evidence against him was tissue thin. Even when it became clear he was innocent, powerful men – from ministers of state to generals and brigadiers – held against him; their justification was to preserve the honour of the French army and ultimately the legitimacy of the government itself. If Dreyfus were to die a wretched death on Devil’s Island then so be it. These men were the Prisoners of Honour.

Before prison I had never considered that truth might be revered. From an early age I had lived a life outside of community, on the edge of society. Truth, justice, integrity and courage were ideals to which I never paid any heed. Corrupted as a boy, without roots or direction I drifted through the years doing as much as I needed to survive, regardless of the cost to others. By the time I’d been sentenced to life I was so far adrift I believed there was never going to be any way back. Any notion that I might experience a meaningful future would have been absurd. I was finished.

Life imprisonment had brought my painful, pain-causing life to an end – and I was glad of it.

But the courage of Alfred Dreyfus made me think in a way I had never thought before. He survived more than four years of isolated desolation, suffering fevers, rheumatic spasms, malnutrition and almost deathly depression – so severe at one point that he commented in his diary, ‘How happy are the dead’. His treatment at the hands of the authorities worsened. For months he was shackled to his bed from sunset to sunrise, ‘like a mounted insect’ and his guards were ordered to harass him by talking loudly around him and to march noisily about his little prison at night.

ALFRED DREYFUS’S PRISON, photograph by Martin Argles of the Guardian

The Minister of Colonies knew Dreyfus was deteriorating and had a quantity of embalming fluid shipped to the penal settlement’s Commandant, in case of his demise. Yet his diary records that he never gave up on his country. ‘I hope that this horrible torture ends soon – if not, I leave my children to France, the motherland that I have always served with devotion and loyalty’.

Thanks to the campaigning of courageous men, in particular the writer Émile Zola, the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus was eventually set aside and after four years, two months and five days on Devils’ Island he was brought back to France. Two re-trials followed and finally in 1906 he was exonerated. Later he was decorated with the Legion of Honour – the most distinguished award his country could offer. His story, as told by David Lewis, was at the same time terrible and magnificent – but it was the way Dreyfus managed his suffering which impressed me most – me, who had never valued courage, integrity or truth.

It was the courage of Dreyfus that ignited my wildest fantasy.

In my Wandsworth cell I imagined that one day if I lived long enough and again tasted freedom, I would visit Devil’s Island and walk in his steps. I would go to his prison and think about him and his suffering and his courage. I would hold onto the bars and look out over the Atlantic just as he had done. I would try to feel his presence and breathe in his imprisoned air. I’d squeeze the bars and try to find some truth of my own.

It was an outrageous fantasy. My prison cell had three sets of bars on the small window set high up on the back wall. I shat in a bucket and slept on a metal cot with a stinking wafer-thin mattress and laid my head on half a sponge pillow. I had scarcely a spoon of hope, just a table and a chair and my six pathetic books a week. But I took some vicarious moral lessons from Dreyfus’s torment. The mire I had buried myself in was a little less engulfing when I thought about Alfred Dreyfus and fantasised about one day sharing his precious space.

WANDSWORTH PRISON D2 LANDING

I spent the first year of my sentence locked in that cell for twenty three hours a day until I was shipped out to my first high security prison which proved to be a place of possibilities. Here there was a chapel, a gymnasium, workshops and an education department. There were people who worked there who wanted to help men like the man I had become. A psychologist said to me, ‘While you are in prison you must try and educate yourself.’ I said, ‘I am too thick for education’. I was almost thirty years old. She said angrily, ‘Nobody is “thick”! We all have potential. We all have the ability to become who we want to be, who we should be’. I said, ‘Even me?’ She didn’t answer, just looked at me disdainfully. It was a look that forced me to apply to attend evening classes. I chose the English class as I remembered that before I was corrupted, when I was still a good little boy, I liked English. One of my favourite books had been My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell who coincidentally had fed my childhood fantasies with the story of his idyllic childhood growing up on the Greek Island of Corfu. Nobody else outside school noted this odd ability and when I left after just a few years of sporadic attendance it faded into nothing more than my secret good thing.

The English teacher in prison was young and pretty and gave me good marks for my work. ‘I’m putting you in for an exam,’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘Do you think I’ll pass?’ She thought I was joking. But I did pass, with a Grade A. I couldn’t wait to show my O level certificate to the psychologist. ‘We all have potential remember. Just do your best… you owe it to your victims.’

Years passed and despite the varied and challenging vagaries of life on prison wings and landings I passed more exams. The prisoner hierarchy I learned is a realm with no rules. A riot, a siege, a food revolt, a sit-down protest in the exercise yard – suicides, murders, helplessness and cruelty – the worst of human nature bubbling along from year to year, with only moments of kindness, compassion, generosity and sacrifice. The psychological toll of prison life is heavy – the mental pressures intense. People being good and people being bad on both sides of the divide. Through it all I became known as ‘the man who can write a good letter’. It was a title I liked. It helped me to survive. Writing letters for others who were less literate than I enabled me to provide a service for my community – something I had never done before. I involved myself in writing groups, helped to publish prison magazines, wrote letters to newspapers. While my role as camp scribe flourished, I indulged in another fantasy. If my life had been different perhaps I could have been a writer, maybe a journalist. Unlike my Dreyfus fantasy this one had some merit – it became a dream.

‘If I live long enough and if I ever again taste freedom…’

Despite my naïve ability to string words together the chances, in fairness, of such a dream becoming a reality were slim. And then in 1994, ten years after I was sent to prison, I wrote an article for the Independent newspaper and it was published. They asked for another and that was published too. Still the vagaries of prison life persisted and still I wrote. An article for the Guardian newspaper sent on spec was published in 1998 – and then in 1999 an extraordinary stroke of fortune occurred. A warm, good-natured probation officer paid me a visit. Richard expressed an interest in how I spent my time in prison. ‘I like to write,’ I said. He seemed impressed. ‘My next door neighbour is a writer,’ he said, ‘His name is Ronan Bennett.’ I knew that Ronan Bennett was an Irish writer who had been imprisoned when he was 18 years old for a murder he hadn’t committed and had spent two years in Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland.

I’d read a book that Bennett had helped to write called Stolen Years by Paul Hill, one of the people convicted of the Guildford Pub Bombing of 1974 who was sentenced to life imprisonment – and later cleared of all charges and released after serving 15 years. I had also read a novel by Bennett called, The Second Prison. We talked about Ronan Bennett’s writing. Clearly I was a fan. ‘Why don’t you drop him a line?’ Richard said. I did and so began an earnest correspondence. A year or so later I had a message from the landing officer to call Ronan. ‘It’s urgent,’ said the officer.

When I called him Ronan told me that he had been talking to an editor at the Guardian. ‘He’s looking for a serving prisoner to write a regular column about prison life for the paper,’ he said, ‘and I’ve told him about you.’ Ian Katz was then the editor of G2, the paper’s features section. I sent him some articles that I thought might work as columns. He wrote back to me and then came to see me. ‘Well, you can write,’ he said, ‘but I need to know more about you and about why you are in here.’ It was a tense visit. I’d never met a newspaper editor before. He was a family man, a professional man who exuded integrity. Instinctively I respected him. I hated having to discuss the worst aspects of myself with him – but I wanted him to know me and to trust me and so I opened up and told him the truth. I wondered after the visit whether he would still want me to write for him. It was a big responsibility he was taking on, a big risk, to his reputation and to that of his newspaper.

Each day following Ian Katz’s visit I waited anxiously for the post. A week passed before my name appeared on the letter board outside the wing office. I stuck my head in the door and saw an envelope on the desk bearing the Guardian logo. ‘Cheers Guv,’ I said as the landing officer passed it to me. I raced back to my cell and tore it open. Katz was polite but brief. ‘It was nice to meet you,’ he wrote, ‘We’d like you to write three columns of 800 wds to start. We’ll call it A Life Inside.’

The governor responsible for lifers was unimpressed when I asked for his approval to write the column. ‘I’ll give you fifty small nos or one big no but the answer will be the same,’ he said, ‘I suggest you get another hobby.’ We argued. He stonewalled. I picked up the evidence of my modest writing achievements that I had spread on his desk and began slipping them back into my folder. I was about to slope out of his office when I remembered the distance learning journalism course I had done a few years earlier on the back of my first article in the Independent – with the support and encouragement of the Prison Service. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. I pulled out the course diploma and showed it to him. ‘You encouraged me to do this.’ He looked a little shame faced, lowered his eyes and said,

‘We didn’t expect you do to any real journalism.’

Persistent and determined I wrote to the home office, supported by Ian Katz and eventually the then prisons minister Paul Boateng agreed I should be allowed to write the column. ‘I’m content for this to go ahead,’ were his precise words. The inaugural column appeared in February 2000, entitled: ‘How Beggsy fell out with Bob’ – a little vignette about a fall out over a newspaper between two prisoners in neighbouring cells. It was the first column of its kind in the history of British journalism. I received £20 a month from the Guardian for phone cards so I could telephone in my copy to the copy takers from the wing phone booth. The money the paper paid for the column went to charity. I wrote the column from my prison cell for four and a half years and then in August 2004, exactly twenty years to the day since I had been taken into custody, the parole board ordered my release.

When I stepped out through the prison gate on that hot August day and breathed free air for the first time in two decades I had no sense of triumph. Those twenty years barely made a dent in the debt I owed my victims. But I had done my best and now I had to learn to live again. Writing helped. I wrote more columns for the Guardian and then tried my hand at features and interviews.

Prison was almost always my theme – the one thing I knew about more than anything else. Inside I was fearful of it, but mastered it sufficiently to survive it. Outside I became fascinated by it – and I never forgot about Alfred Dreyfus.

In 2006, just over two years after my release from prison I pitched an idea to the Guardian Features editor, by then Katherine Viner. ‘Kath,’ I said, ‘this year is the centenary of the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus. Would you consider me visiting his prison on Devil’s Island and writing about it for Guardian readers?’ Her response was positive and within a month I was high in the sky on my way to Guyane Française, accompanied by Guardian photographer Martin Argles.

We landed at Cayenne, the capital, and made our way by hire car to Kourou, the departure point for tourists to the Salvation Islands. I asked around at the harbour – a patch of wasteland with access to a couple of river pontoons – to see if I could get a boat ride to Devil’s Island. Though trips were available to Royale Island and from there to St Joseph’s Island it was made clear to me that going anywhere near Devil’s Island was ‘strictement interdit’. So the next day we headed for Royale on a tourist catamaran. When the islands appeared in the distance I asked the skipper’s mate what the chances were of us getting on Devil’s Island. ‘Pas bon,’ he said. Drawing closer, the lush greenness of the three islands seemed to glow under the dazzling blue sky. To me they looked magical. Once our boat was anchored in the tiny harbour we disembarked and made our way up to what had once been the guards’ mess hall which would be our accommodation for the night.

The next day we toured the island, inspecting the site of the guillotine and the old prison barracks. The prison buildings are entangled with jungle overgrowth, but surprisingly well preserved. Picking my way through the narrow corridors, avoiding the tribes of fire ants and massive cobwebs, the vines and the rampaging tree roots, I was struck by the quantity of rusting iron. Scattered everywhere are pieces of chain, steel bars, bolts and fetters.

INSIDE THE CRIMSON BARRACKS, photograph by Martin Argles of the Guardian

I asked the captain again if he would take me across the shark-infested channel to Devil’s Island. ‘Non,’ he said, but agreed to ask his friend who knew some fishermen from neighbouring Suriname who fished the waters. An hour or so later I heard a voice call out from the harbour. ‘Monsieur!’ The captain’s friend had spoken to the skipper of a passing pirogue, a kind of motorised dug-out canoe. The skipper and his two-man crew who had sailed all the way from Paramaribo agreed to put Martin and I on to Devil’s Island and would collect us 30 minutes later for €100 – about £70. ‘It’s a deal,’ I said.

I was grateful the skipper was a master navigator. As he edged his vessel through the violent swells of the crystal-green sea towards the rocks the dangerousness of our venture hit home. When we were less than six feet from Devil’s Island preparing to disembark I understood why it had been so difficult to persuade anyone local to bring us here. ‘Allez!’ shouted the second mate, pointing at the one flat-faced rock among the jagged mass. There was no time to hesitate and no turning back. I jumped and Martin followed.

Within a few adrenaline-pumped minutes we had scrambled over the rocks and entered the thick jungle undergrowth, almost immediately getting tangled up in the huge sticky cobwebs that hung all around. Panic began to rise in my chest as hand-sized spiders appeared from nowhere and dashed blindly over me. I felt bites on my legs and arms, but kept running, faster, slipping and sliding on ground knee-deep in rotting coconuts while Martin raced after me. At last we broke into a clearing, and there, 20 paces ahead of us stood the one-man prison of Alfred Dreyfus. I stopped running and walked nervously towards the tiny stone building. The iron barred gate, rusting and bent, hung open. I walked inside and breathed in the cool air. I looked around for a sign that might tell of his ordeal, a plaque perhaps to mark his courage. But there was nothing.

DREYFUS’S PRISON AND ERWIN JAMES, photograph by Martin Argles of the Guardian

As I paced his stone floor and looked out through his window bars, I was exhilarated but at the same time troubled by the pervading sense of deprivation. I grasped his window bars and stared out across the Atlantic ocean…

Postscript:

Just before Christmas last year I tracked down an email address for David L Lewis – I should say Pulitzer Prize winner Professor David Levering Lewis – and wrote to him: ‘Dear Professor Lewis – I hope you don’t mind me contacting you out of the blue – but for many years your book, Prisoners of Honour, has been a huge influence in my thinking. I am a writer and journalist, mainly for UK’s The Guardian newspaper. I was sent to prison for life in 1984. My first year was in isolation and I was allowed six books a week from the prison library. But the book that had the most impact on me was your book, sent to me by a friend. I vowed if I ever got out of jail alive I would visit Devil’s Island and see where brave Dreyfus was confined. There was little hope I could ever learn to live among civilised society again – but against the odds I did. And not only that I made it to Devil’s Island and stood for some moments in Dreyfus’ prison. I just wanted you to know that it was your book that inspired me to want to make that journey. Thank you.’

To my amazement I received a reply. ‘Dear Mr. James, Yours is the first verifiable evidence I think I’ve received that one of my books ever did anybody much good. Be assured that your special appreciation of Prisoners of Honour will stay with me forever. I envy your satisfaction – sense of closure, it must have been – of setting foot on Devil’s Island. Let me thank you again for taking time to send your ‘out of the blue’ memoir. It is surely one of the most arresting messages of the Christmas season I expect to receive. Best wishes, David Levering Lewis.’

After reading his email I cried for the first time in a long time. It marked the end of a journey that began in that miserable Wandsworth prison cell when my friend sent me a book. He had written inside, ‘You never know where a good book might take you…’

More: read our writers’ recommendations for books to send to a friend in prison, ‘Beat the Ban!’

While reading through the poems and prose of John Clare recently in order to compile a quiz for literary ornithologists, I found references to mystery birds, an unexpected treat in this poet who sees and finds a name for everything. ‘I frit them up from Swordy well a pond so called by the roman bank which is never dry and often haunted by water birds’, Clare writes, and he describes them as fully as he can, an unwasted experience, and maybe in hope that someone else will identify or know them, ‘four odd looking Birds like large swallows of a slate colour on their wings and back and their bellys white they had forked tails and long wings and flew exactly in the manner of the swallow but instead of skimming along the ground they rose to a great height’.

This set me looking for a poem by Edward Thomas called ‘The Unknown Bird’ in which the song of the unknown bird draws the poet, and is both alert and soothing in his memory. The Clare bird quiz is coming. Start brushing up now on your bumbarrels, throstles and butter bumps if you want to get ahead. But here is Edward Thomas’s poem for the quiet pleasure and goodness of it. The poem is a sharing of solitude, and its pausing, air-filled syntax almost compels you to hear it in a hush:

The Unknown Bird by Edward Thomas

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.
Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off —
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is — I told men
What I had heard.

++++++++++++++I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
‘Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

The transformation of isolation and gloom: ‘others never sang / In the great beech wood all that May and June’ into a moment of rare encounter: ‘Three lovely notes… too soft to be heard / if others sang’ is an instant deepening of attention. There are many beautiful lines in the poem. I love the doggedness of ‘All the proof is — I told men / What I had heard’. Self as evidence. Being moved as proof. I love the line endings and almost forgetful syntax which nevertheless keeps sense intact. But more than anything it’s the internal work in the poet’s memory through those last three sentences, through all the delays and distances, that filters sadness until it turns up with a kick of joy, ‘straightaway… Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore’. Gorgeous and I don’t know that there isn’t a deal of truth in the very mechanism of the poem. For all the softness of his approach, Thomas has a way of getting in behind your defences and staying like a living presence in your own memory.

Do you have a favourite line or moment from this poem? Or a favourite Edward Thomas poem you would like to share?

New rules, implemented last November by Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, mean that UK prisoners are banned from receiving books and other items in the post. The effect on the prisoners is inevitably demoralising and has led to much discussion (see today’s Bookseller) and public protest.

‘In prison you exist on dreams’ writes Erwin James of the Guardian and one-time life-sentence prisoner, showing how a book can befriend and help a mind to understand itself and gather strength. In the right conditions (I hesitate to use this phrase for prison), in trouble, in need, a silent book makes a paradoxically good questioner and listener. We asked the writers in issue 54 of The Reader what book they would send to a friend in jail.

Shauneen Lambe

I often send books into the people that I work with who are in prison. I have been told how important it is to have books in prison and that they are read over and over with different parts resonating in different readings. The books I send most frequently are The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee and The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama.

Many of the people that I have worked with have sold drugs; selling drugs is of course illegal in our society. I give them The Great Gatsby to show that engaging in a prohibited activity does not, necessarily, make you a bad person. Gatsby is set in Prohibition America, Gatsby got very wealthy from selling unlawful alcohol. The story is not that Gatsby is an evil guy – he’s breaking the law but he is not the dark element in the book. The amorality, or some might think immorality, comes from those who are considered law abiding. I think it’s a perfect analogy for our times, doing something unlawful may not be the most troubling thing, how you live your life is up to each individual and you can choose who you want to be irrespective of what you do.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my all-time favourite books and I often send it to the younger kids that I work with. There are so many great lessons in it primarily about the transition from childhood to adulthood, which is so difficult and confusing. Such as; learning that the world is not fair, having faith in human beings around you, people are not always who we believe them to be and being scared can stop us seeing clearly.

The Audacity of Hope: I really believe that Obama’s election as President can allow everyone to dream and aspire to leadership. Lots of our young people talk about lack of positive role models. It is relatively easy to aspire to be a hip hop star or rich but now it is within everyone’s reach, to be a leader of a country, to be involved in social engagement. Often having the confidence to believe that something is possible is enough to begin the process.

Chris Grayling’s decision to ban parcels, which includes books to prisoners, seems extremely short-sighted and does not help with rehabilitation or reintegration, which are two of the principles for children in the criminal justice system.

Simon Palfrey

As for a book for prisoners, my choice is Endgame, by Samuel Beckett. When I first came to teach at Liverpool University in 1999, one of my tasks was to set-up the English part of the Arts faculty’s Go Higher programme, to help get people who (for whatever reason) hadn’t completed formal schooling prepared for undergraduate study. I put Endgame on the syllabus, because it was short and striking and, I guessed, likely to make them think things they had never thought before. Far from it. ‘I get it’, one of them said, a woman in perhaps her mid-50s – ‘it’s one moment, isn’t it – life is one moment’ – and a penny dropped for me. Another student, likewise a woman of middle-age, laughed at Nell and Nagg, living in bins, every day emerging and hoping to kiss, as though it was the simplest, most pared-down realism, an epitome of marriage, or of one life indentured to another. Her words were simpler and better: ‘That’s what life’s like, isn’t it, for a lotta people? It doesn’t mean you’ve stopped feeling or remembering.’ But I also like Beckett’s rare, gritty commitment to sentimentality, a shared emotional currency, so often disdained as false or cheap, but which he redeems as humanly true. Because for all that the play seems to get deep inside what it is like to live in an unfree body, condemned to daily recursion, and for all its knowledge of cruelty and guilt, it also shows the most beautiful commitment to endurance, even in, even as, desolation: “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing”. We are together in our loneliness. “You…remain.” There is food here for many a dark moment.

John Scrivener

What to send to a friend in prison? I’m not sure, because needs might be so different – Bonhoeffer’s Letters & Papers from Prison for one person, PG Wodehouse for another (or both for the same person at different times). One book I would recommend to anyone, in or out of prison, is Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, a wonderful book whose title sometimes puts people off. The central character Kostoglotov is a political prisoner being treated for cancer, and the novel is a profound exploration of freedom, responsibility and corruption – but this is not a political book, finally, and certainly not just a ‘Cold War’ one, but rather a Tolstoyan celebration of life.

Casi Dylan

There’s a young lawyer in Anton Chekov’s short story ‘The Bet’, who stays in solitary confinement for fifteen years as part of a wager with an old banker. During the last two years of this self-imposed sentence he reads:

an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately. At one time he was busy with the natural sciences, then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare. There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry, and a manual of medicine, and a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

I imagine that there would be a temptation within the singular time/space of prison life to clutch at reading in this way. My first thought was that I would try to re-connect, re-build something through my reading: work through, perhaps, my parents’ messy bookshelves one by one, and through them discover the thoughts which had (in)formed earlier years together, now held in books which to my eyes then seemed little more than slightly sad furniture. Could I re-trace life – theirs, mine – through such a reading history? But perhaps the friend to whom I am giving this advice would not have a reading history and shelves of books to draw on. Knowing what we do about the literacy levels of prisoners, this is likely to be the case. And so my recommendation would be to build up to tackle Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. It’s a novel in two parts: in the first we see Jim, a young seaman on the Patna, abandon his sinking ship full of passengers, and publicly held to account; the second part is the story of his attempts to come to terms with this action, to re-build a life. He becomes ‘satisfied… nearly’, but ultimately his tragedy is that fails to get over his failure. Conrad writes that ‘there are as many shipwrecks as there are men’; in that prison cell, I feel there would be something especially important in the knowledge that failure in itself is not the biggest wrong.

David McVey

As a big PG Wodehouse fan I would recommend a big omnibus of his work – Jeeves or Blandings or any other. Endless entertainment, lots of laughs and all set in a world that never existed so not really prompting thoughts of freedoms lost. And, of course, you are exposed to the work of one of the great masters of English prose. Reading and rereading the work you’ll painlessly become more familiar and comfortable with English usage and, effectively, acquire the kind of skill that will help keep you from re-offending once you’re out. Break the ban – everybody send parcels ­­­of Wodehouse to prisons!

Drummond Bone

Depends on what kind of pal, doesn’t it? But let’s assume it’s somebody prepared to ‘dig-in’ intellectually – I would send them Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities in the English translation that includes the final unfinished volume – it’s funny in places, it sees society as pretty mad (which it is), it’s not frightened to think seriously about one of its central characters who is in prison for murder, it’s erotic which usually helps, and there is real love in there too, both its problems and its immense joys. It is also very long which will help time pass, and there is something oddly comforting about the fact that it is unfinished, and looks unfinishable.

John White

Regarding a good book to send to a ‘pal’ in jail, I felt it more realistic (knowing my pals) to choose for the type of male who has lost or neglected the reading habit of late. I would send him David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, partly because its various stories will transport him instantly to other worlds, but also because they will remind him of the inexhaustible possibilities of fiction. Since the nested doll structure of Mitchell’s book hints at our interconnectedness (however unique we think our own story), it might even help him avoid the sort of behaviour that got him in jail to begin with. Interestingly, I completed a spell of jury service last week, agreeing a unanimous verdict on a rather nasty crime that will almost certainly see its perpetrator sent to prison later this month. I suspect this young man is not an avid reader, but I would try to reel him in by sending him something fairly masculine, with the quality of fable, that got him to think a little more about common humanity. Two books that come to mind, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, ought to stocked be in every prison library.

Julie-ann Rowell

The book I would choose for my imprisoned friend would be Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, which imagines a world where books are not permitted and if discovered are destroyed. The rebels in this dystopian future are those who are interested in and captivated by books. It is a novel that is very prescient about developments in late twentieth century Western society including the advent of mass media and the dominance of television, and works as a warning about government censorship and the loss of literature. It would be a compelling read with themes relevant to what’s happening today that I hope my friend would want to discuss with others.

Jennie Owen

To Kill a Mockingbird Published by American author Harper Lee in 1960, a moving story about prejudice and loss of innocence, about the journey from childhood to becoming an adult. However, what is really striking about Harper’s prose, is the warmth that pervades even the most serious of subject matter.

Sean Elliott

Because people have such different tastes I’d be happier recommending a shelf of books for a prison rather than one title. For those who want to escape their surroundings (metaphorically) into a harmless, comic world there is P G Wodehouse. He wrote enough to keep you going for a hefty stretch but Summer Lightning is a good starting point. It is a story of love and pigs. George Eliot’s semi-autobiographical The Mill on the Floss is a great Victorian novel to immerse yourself in for hours. She writes about childhood and early friendships with an almost painful intensity. Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave was written during the Second World War and is a celebration of the pleasures of travel, great food and witty conversation. It also recommends the keeping of lemurs as pets. If I had to pick one book though it would be Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. The broke narrator struggles to get by in the city, surviving from one meagre windfall to the next. Hamsun had spent ten years of poverty before writing Hunger but the prose is alive with the joy of someone creating the book they were born to write. Without ever being preachy, it is about starting over and about the excitement of finding the right words.

Dame Stephanie Shirley

Dear Jo [Dame Stephanie writes]: I hope you enjoy The Great Hedge of India by Roy Moxham as much as I did. This detective story memoir is a tragi-comedy of Victorian folly and influenced my whole view of the British Empire.

Niall Firth

I’d like to nominate Simon Armitage’s Zoom – the first book of poetry that I fell in love with. It made me realise that poetry is not all fluff and ‘poetical’ language – or at least it doesn’t have to be. Zoom is what made Armitage’s name as a poet and it’s packed with moving, clever, and witty poems about everyday life. The language is slangy,everyday accessible but then twisted into forms that make you do the equivalent of a comedy double-take. This is the book I’d give to someone who told me they didn’t like poetry. Some are culled from his life as a probation officer in Manchester, others are about cricket, or football or just the life of a single ten-pence-piece. Or the book’s opener “Snow Joke”, about a man who dies when his car gets stuck in a blizzard. They’re all filled with northern dialect and amusing, surprising turns of phrase. There’s a touch of stand-up to them. They make you laugh, wince and think.

Margaret Drabble

I would send Pilgrim’s Progress, to remind that great books can be written in the Slough of Despond, and Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, because it is such an astonishingly rich, colourful, lively, witty and profound novel, full of hope and energy. I would also send Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, as it is inordinately long, and one would need a jail sentence to get through it. It is very good on prisons and criminology, as well as on many other stranger matters. I only finished it because I committed myself out of bravado to discussing it on Radio 3. It was challenging but very rewarding.

Megg Hewlett

The Grass Arena, John Healy

‘My father didn’t look like he would harm anyone.’ The first sentence in John Healy’s autobiography The Grass Arena, which socks its own punch to me as reader ominously foreshadowing what is to come; the little boy brutalised by his own and, barely out of childhood, rapidly descending into alcoholism, homelessness, crime, violence and incarceration. This is no misery memoir it is a raw, visceral, unflinching often horrific account of the life of a ‘wino’ on the streets of London and it reads like poetry.

Why recommend such a book to someone in prison, likely to be struggling with confinement and with unpleasant amounts of time to think?

Because when I’m really struggling I need to be met in the place of struggle with the self same force, nothing less will do.

And because even though it’s hard to believe anyone could survive the life described here, they have and here is the evidence that it’s possible to come back from what might seem like certain annihilation.

And, finally, it’s really good to know and be reminded that it is possible.

What book would you send to a friend in prison, or what would you read yourself if a book seemed like your best and only resource?